NASA Considers Autonomous Martian Helicopter To Augment Future Rovers

SternisheFan (2529412) writes with this story at the Verge about an approach being considered by NASA to overcome some of the difficulties in moving a wheeled or multi-legged ground vehicle around the surface of Mars, which has proven to be a difficult task. Rover teams still have a tough time with the Martian surface even though they're flush with terrestrial data. The alien surface is uneven, and ridges and valleys make navigating the terrain difficult. The newest solution proposed by JPL is the Mars Helicopter, an autonomous drone that could 'triple the distances that Mars rovers can drive in a Martian day,' according to NASA. The helicopter would fly ahead of a rover when its view is blocked and send Earth-bound engineers the right data to plan the rover's route.

Comments

Lift?

[seven of five]

Atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1% that of Earth. How're you going to get any lift?

Re:Lift?

[ColdWetDog]

BIG rotors made of aerogel.

But I agree, what NASA needs is God's Little Toy from Pattern Recognition (W. Gibson, I think it's that book).

Basically a blimp with a camera. It could even be tethered.

Re:Lift?

[OzPeter]

Atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1% that of Earth. How're you going to get any lift?

Gee I dunno .. why not watch TFV and see what the experts say. You know .. the video where they talk about needed to spin the blades at 2400 rpm, and shows the drone mockups being tested in a chamber that they pump down to Mars conditions.

Re:Lift?

[ShanghaiBill]

BIG rotors made of aerogel.

Aerogel is really fragile stuff. I bought a few pieces of it for my daughter's science project. It looks like a little cube of smoke, and you can barely feel it sitting on the palm of your hand. But even with reasonable careful handling, the corners broke off, and some of the pieces snapped in half. It is not something you could use to build a rotor that will fly more than once.

According to TFV, they make the helicopter work by spinning the rotor really fast (2400 RPM), keeping it really light, and only flying 2-3 minutes per day. They don't say what the rotor is made out of, but it doesn't look like aerogel.

Re:Lift?

[Immerman]

A tethered blimp isn't a scouting drone, it's a periscope. And given those winds an untethered blimp would likely never see the rover again, so still no good for scouting.

It might be interesting as an independent, largely unsteerable, low-altitude survey drone to study wind patterns and look for interesting target regions for the next mission, but at that point we've changed the mission parameters so drastically that it's no longer relevant to the original discussion

Re:Lift?

[Immerman]

Well, the prototypes might be using plastic for ease-of-revision, but my guess would be molded carbon fiber, at least for later prototypes and the final product - I don't think there's anything competitive in terms of durability and strength-to-weight ratio, and the cost is peanuts by NASA budget standards. Hell, once shipping costs to Mars are factored in it's probably cheaper.

Hmm, come to think of it, I wonder why we see so much metal used in the current rovers.

Re:Lift?

[Immerman]

It's still a periscope - you can use it to see over hills, but not to scout ahead.

You'll also get piss-poor lift with a hot air balloon - Martian air density is only 0.02kg/m^3, compared to the 1.2+kg/m^3 on Earth. The colder temperatures will help somewhat, offering a better density gradient with temperature, but you're still talking about a lift of maybe 20% of the displaced air mass, versus 90% for a helium balloon. Even with helium, a balloon 2m across could lift under 80g, minus it's own weight. A hot air balloon of similar size could lift a paltry 16g - scarcely more than the mass of a rubber party balloon. That would have to be a pretty insanely thin skin just to be able to get off the ground.

Re:Lift?

[dougmc]

Atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1% that of Earth. How're you going to get any lift?

if you rotate the blades 10x as fast as you do on Earth, you'll get the same lift.

That said, gravity on Mars is 1/3rd as much as Earth, so you only need 1/3rd the lift. So rotating the blades at 6x the rate you'd rotate them on Earth would be sufficient.

Or you could go with much larger blades.

Either way ... it's doable. It would require more power than it would on Earth, but it's certainly doable.

This is a pretty interesting discussion of how we'd fly on Mars, done in the context of the X-Plane simulator. It's written with fixed wing planes in mind rather than helicopters, but most of it still applies.

Re:Lift?

[Jane Q. Public]

Care to cite any evidence of that?

Care to explain why you had to ask?

Google is your friend. (Sometimes, anyway.) So is Wikipedia.

Re:Airflow for lift

[Immerman]

The video however shows a full-scale mockup of the craft being developed, as well as a prototype being tested in a vacuum chamber at Mars atmospheric density, with the blades rotating at ~2400rpm. The good bits start at about 1:50.

Why don't you link to the real article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Crazy Engineering: Mars Helicopter on JPL's youtube channel (and it was there 2 days ago...)

NASA trolling

[FeatureSpace]

Here we see NASA trolling for more funding at the expense of real exploration.

A ground vehicle is hands-down the cheapest, most effective, capable and and least risk vehicle for exploring terrain on a planet.

Mars rovers too slow? Put more solar panels on it and drive faster. Solar panels getting covered with dust? Cover the panels with UV resistant and abrasion resistant windows and install wipers or vibration based dust removal systems. Metal wheels getting torn up by rocks? Thicken the metal on the wheels and use a better suspension design. Can't see very far ahead? There are things called telecoping masts.

A helicopter is prone to catestrophic damage (crash) and probably won't have much payload capacity. Its merely an elevated platform for visual, maybe LIDAR sensing.

So instead of building better rovers NASA now wants you to believe we need a helicopter on Mars!

There Is A Better Solution

[VernonNemitz]

Nature evolved legs for dealing with rough terrain. NASA needs to start using walking rovers, not rolling rovers.